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Monthly Archives: May 2015

Just a quick update regarding another change that will be going in soon.

Since deploying the first version of Arena mode, the “temporary arena results screen” has had a line in it called “Performance” that’s supposed to provide an indication of how well you played during your arena run (a “performance rating”.) It currently looks like this:

The temporary arena results screen. Performance rating has been highlighted.

A quick news update before we get on with the rest of today’s article: in celebration of our new balance patch, we’ve posted a Kickstarter update highlighting some of our recent accomplishments and previewing a few more new skins. If you haven’t yet claimed your supporter badge, instructions are provided there!

Did you know that blog articles containing pictures are 82% more likely to be read and shared, and that 63% of statistics are actually made up on the spot?

Today, we’re going to be continuing our discussion on how Prismata openings influence our decisions regarding unit balance. Last week, we discussed how our goal in designing each Prismata unit is to find the best, most balanced, and most interesting version of that unit, and showed how specific opening timings can create design challenges because certain unit designs can favour certain players or certain strategies too much.

Like last time, I’ll be sharing a few pages from our developer-exclusive secret opening book. To understand how to analyze some of the rushes and timings that exist in these openings, we first need to discuss two important strategy game concepts: Tempo and Initiative.

Today at 12 noon EST, we deployed our largest Prismata balance patch thus far. A total of 14 units have received changes. In this article, I’m going to provide an explanation for each change, explaining our thought processes, and what we’ll be looking toward doing with future units and balance changes.

Militia – health has been increased from 2 health to 4 health.

This is a simple change that will hopefully make some Militia games a bit more interesting. We found that, while players often bought Militias during the opening to take advantage of their gold-producing ability while the opponent constructed early defenses, Militias had little use in the late game, often being simply worse than Steelsplitters. Now, with higher HP, the decision between Militias and Steelsplitters will be more interesting later in the game.

In today’s article, I’m going to reveal a few Prismata secrets that we’ve never shared with the public: we’ll be showing off some pages from our secret opening book (yes, we have one!)

Before I do that, I have two announcements to make:

(1) A huge balance patch is happening this weekend, and it will go live at noon EST on Saturday, May 23rd. We’ll be tweaking a total of 13 different Prismata units. Just for fun, the tweaks are being revealed one at a time on our Twitter page. Be sure to follow us to receive every update as it arrives.

(2) Our AI Mastermind Dave is conducting a Prismata AI survey. We’re really interested in how people think we’re doing with respect to the Prismata bots, so if you haven’t filled out the survey yet, we’d really appreciate it!

Prismata’s robot overlords will be taking over soon.

Now, let’s get to the meat of the article. I apologize in advance for the fact that this is a bit rambly, geeky, and somewhat technical. But revealing secret openings is serious business!

Before we get to today’s article, I want to introduce our latest new summer intern, Jordan Verasamy!

As you can see in the background, Jordan uses a mechanical keyboard with no letters printed on it. And yes, he looks this smug in real life. Like our other co-ops, Jordan was temporarily granted access to sunlight for this photograph.

Jordan will be working on various roles in support, QA, and automation. He’ll be catching bugs, making our server more secure, and simulating thousands of users on our system to help pinpoint scalability bottlenecks. He’s also a Tier 8 Prismata player.